Since the 2010s, Meghann Riepenhoff (American, b. 1979) has emerged as a leading contemporary photographer for her innovative use of cyanotypes to visualize the environment and humanity’s impact upon it. This exhibition presents Riepenhoff’s ongoing series, Waters of the Americas, which exposes the often-unseen effects of climate change, shifting natural cycles, and chemical emissions on bodies of water from New York to Miami, and from Bainbridge Island, Washington, where the artist lives and works, to San Diego, where she recently completed a monumental commission for The San Diego Museum of Art at Mission Beach.

With their undulating forms and rich gradations from deep indigo to pale blue, warm rust, and foamy white, Riepenhoff’s photographs evoke the sputtering of water and crashing of waves that are both subject and process of her artwork. Rather than practicing traditional landscape photography, Riepenhoff collaborates with the environment without a camera. She immerses light-sensitive paper in oceans, rivers, and lakes, making unique cyanotypes that physically register tides, rain, and ice. These “fingerprints of time and place,” as the artist calls them, conjure the scale and all-over compositions of abstract painting. Riepenhoff’s cyanotypes not only expand our understanding of photography—they also encourage viewers to reflect on our brief time on Earth, and the lasting effects of our actions on its future.